There is a Band-Aid for the love-impoverished, but it costs about $36 and it doesn’t include a martini. Our quick-fixing society has found yet another way to cut the bullshit to under five minutes with the advent of speed dating. But while the bandage may stick at first, it ends up just sliding off with nothing much to hold on to. We either need better adhesives or we will just have to keep dating the old fashioned way. I vote for Velcro: it sticks but there’s no commitment, and it’s flexible enough for a fickle city like LA.

It’s a beautiful Thursday afternoon in the Brentwood hills, peaceful and quiet as though I’m no longer in L.A. The Southwest-style clubhouse of the Riviera Country Club stands gallant and vast, like the home of a Columbian drug lord, and I’m here for the quarterly luncheon of the Saint John’s Retired Physician’s Association. In spite of my shadowy past as an amateur surgeon and street pharmacist, I am in fact here to interview the former Los Angeles District Attorney and now prominent photographer Gil Garcetti, who is today’s main speaker. But I’m sweating in the sun while taking these notes and must move toward the clubhouse. Suddenly, I wonder if there’s a no-denim policy here, as is customary among country clubs. I’m wearing blue jeans. The sign just outside the main entrance reads Proper Attire Required… Not sure exactly what that means.

Following the puzzlingly successful Christie’s New York sale of postwar and contemporary art on November 13th, where Rothko’s “Untitled: Red, Blue, Orange” fetched a hefty $34.2 million alone, I was trying to reconcile the strained economic climate of the local art community in Los Angeles with the heavy hitters in New York. Although the last several years have been an economic nightmare for most Americans, at what point does the idea of a recession become bigger than the recession itself? What effect is the economic downturn having on the L.A. art scene, and is the success of the Christie’s auction a sign of recovery, or more of the same price inflation of modern art that we were seeing before the recession? I also thought about the old adage that creativity and poverty go together like peanut butter and jelly—well, maybe not in those exact words. To put it bluntly, is the recession good for art?

Like the music industry or the neighborhood video store, the publishing industry is witnessing a transition of its own; a farewell, perhaps, to hardcopies as a way of life, and an emphasis on the transitory nature of the screen-read. In November of 2009, Amazon, the powerful online purveyor of books and music, flew out several of New York’s most prominent literary agents to Seattle to break down their business plan. This business plan featured drastic cost-cutting on the prices of new hard covers from $25 to $8.99, and an aggressive marketing focus on so-called ‘e-books,’ virtual copies of literature that can be read on mobile devices such as the Kindle.

Suzanne Erickson is constantly surprised to find that she is just like her parents. “I used to get really freaked out when my dad would dig for junk. I’m exactly like my dad now,” she laughs. “I drive through the alleys of Beverly Hills looking for someone else’s garbage.” Suzanne and I are sharing a couch in her studio that might have been garbage itself, were it not for her magnificent reappropriation, inscribing the upholstery with a florid patchwork of paint and needlepoint. She tells me this sort of transformative creativity is inherited from her mother—a woman who would disassemble a bed and convert it into a wet bar in the scant free hours between ferrying Suzanne to and from day school.